As we do in January, we catch up on all the good shit we missed the year prior. For me, this means scrolling back through my Bandcamp wishlist and picking out albums I never got around to pretty much at random. Honestly, I pick whatever has cool artwork. It’s not…

There are plenty of fantastic bands that toil in the margins of relative obscurity. Some eventually find a wider audience and catapult themselves to various levels of fame, while others never reach that coveted status of instantly recognizable. It’s fitting, then, that Pennsylvania upstarts Veilburner signed with the aptly named…

Welcome, once more, to Death’s Door. Wipe your feet on the mat, and be thorough about it. The year is far from done. That’s right, it’s already November. That time when music takes its multi-month hibernation in preparation for the spring release season. Or at least that’s what is supposed…

When reviewing the new Bloodbath album, I suggested that simplistic, straight-forward death metal might not be enough to stand out in a year that has seen the genre well and truly dominated by more forward-thinking, progressive acts. Now I’m thinking I merely may have given the record far too much…

Metal, perhaps more than any other genre in music, lends itself to copious amounts of all-consuming atmosphere. Whether it be the glorious battlefields of Middle-Earth, the deepest pits of hell, the frost-bitten tundras of the north, or the muddy trenches of World War I, metal has a penchant for the…

Music can be shaped and defined by the surroundings and conditions of the people who make it. Perhaps the wide array of folk music around the world is the most obvious example but metal also has its own parallels when it comes to identity and regionality. The Nordic countries of…

Friends. Ingrates. Gutter rats. Welcome once more to Death’s Door. Wipe your feet on the mat and pull up a bone throne. The gore runneth over, and there seems no end to it. How has 2018 been this damn good for death metal? The sheer volume of quality records in…

Our most recent encounter with Tasmanian tech death band Psycroptic saw the four-piece shift gears for the second time in their career. Where the band’s preceding releases demonstrated a groove-focused style of death metal, 2015’s self-titled release pivoted towards a more overtly thrash-influenced look — and further away still from the maniacal…

Up until now, every Bloodbath album has felt like an event—whether through the addition of a new vocalist or the return of an old one. Now, with Paradise Lost’s Nick Holmes recording two albums back-to-back, for the first time in the band’s history, it feels like business as usual. …and…

The extreme end of math metal is without a doubt one of the most interesting areas of heavy music right now. Fans of chaos and digital hellscapes have been spoiled with releases from bands like Frontierer, Coma Cluster Void, and Ion Dissonance. The glue that binds these acts together is…